Tag: fingers

What’s the News: Georgia Tech researchers have now created a glove that heightens your sense of touch. Presented in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the glove—which applies high-frequency vibrations to the side of an exposed fingertip—can improve a wearer’s motor skills and tactile sensitivity. “This device may one day be used to assist individuals whose jobs require high-precision manual dexterity or those with medical conditions that reduce their sense of touch,” Georgia Tech assistant professor Jun Ueda said in a prepared statement.

Meet Linhenykus monodactylus, the dinosaur that gave the world the finger. This parrot-sized theropod isn’t being surly. It just doesn’t have a choice: it’s the first single-digit dinosaur ever discovered.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Xu Xing and colleagues document their find, which turned up in a fossil-rich part of northern China. Linhenykus is probably about 80 million years old.

Linhenykus monodactylus is a member of the theropod dinosaurs, the group of two-legged carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurusrex and Velociraptor. Most theropods had three fingers on each hand. But Linhenykus belongs to a family known as the alvarezsauroids: small, long-legged dinosaurs that had one big finger alongside two barely functional nub fingers. [National Geographic]